


Hay Is for Horses

by lurkinglurkerwholurks



Series: Whumptober 2019 [10]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Superman - All Media Types, World's Finest (Comics)
Genre: Clark Kent is doing his best, Dick Grayson is Robin, Dick Grayson is a Ray of Sunshine, Fluff, Forehead Kisses, Gen, Platonic Cuddling, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Uncle Clark Kent, Vomiting, Whump, Whumptober, Whumptober 2019, but Clark Kent is also very much a young dumb alien bachelor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 01:44:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21263066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurkinglurkerwholurks/pseuds/lurkinglurkerwholurks
Summary: The sleepover had been Dick’s idea.In which Clark is a good but very overwhelmed uncle who is Trying His Best.





	Hay Is for Horses

Clark stopped a runaway train with his bare hands yesterday. He foiled an international smuggling ring the day before. In the past week, he had caught a plane falling from the sky, rushed into infernos, eaten two bombs, and flirted with Lois so subtly that she didn’t even notice but deliberately enough that she _could_ have. And none of those events made his heart race the way it was now.

He had been nervous going into the weekend as it was. Clark liked children, truly. They were fun and energetic, looked at the world with fresh eyes, and had a beautiful sense of wonder. But he didn’t have much experience with them. Catching a child falling from a tree or winking at one while flying overhead was one thing. Being responsible for a small human was something else entirely. They were so _very_ small and so _very_ breakable. Interacting with one felt like the first time Ma had handed him one of the barn cat’s newborn kittens.

It helped that Dick seemed, all in all, a little less breakable than the average human child. He was very springy in a way that Clark envied, and he threw himself off roofs routinely. Clark had never been allowed to throw himself off roofs. The closest he had come was practicing in the barn loft. Pa had always been afraid someone would see. Dick didn’t have those worries so long as he had his Robin outfit, and he was forever jumping from things or flipping over things or using whatever was nearby as a climbing mountain, even Clark.

The sleepover had been Dick’s idea. Bruce had called to let Clark know he was following a lead in Metropolis. The etiquette of superheroes was still nebulous and quasi-formed, but the courtesy call was one they both had agreed upon in very early days. Clark had been somewhere over the mid-Atlantic when his cell phone rang and had already slowed his speed as he mentally ordered anecdotes from his week. Bruce pretended he liked to keep his calls short and focused on business, but Clark knew he secretly liked to listen to Clark ramble. And Clark was a deft rambler. Stories were his bread and butter, after all.

Bruce had been in the middle of sketching a vague outline of his plans for his mission when the call had been interrupted by soft scuffling.

“B. Nrk. Bruce, I wanna—B, c’mon, can—urrrrgh.” Dick’s grunts as he hauled himself up Bruce to the phone were familiar enough to make Clark smile on the other end of the line. He wasn’t a bit surprised when Bruce’s voice was abruptly replaced by Robin’s.

“Hey, Uncle Clark!” Dick’s chirp had made Clark’s smile widen.

“Alfalfa or timothy?” he had replied, comfortably slipping into their regular routine. Dick’s answering huff would be paired with an expressive eyeroll before getting on with whatever he wanted.

“Can I come stay with you while B is in town?”

Trust Dick Grayson to come barreling out with a request that would flummox even Clark.

“Wh—”

“Dick—” Bruce tried to interrupt and failed.

“You always say we gotta hang out more, big guy. B won’t let me help, and I’ll be all by myself up here in this big ol’ house, and I _never_ get to go to Metropolis.”

Clark always felt like he was half a step behind Dick. It was invigorating, like trying to keep up with Lois’s hairpin topic changes, but dizzying too. “What about Alfred?”

“Oh, Alf’s great, but Uncle Clark, he makes me clean. I don’t wanna clean. I’ll get bored.” Dick’s tone thinned into something a touch slyer. “Besides, if I come hang stay with you, B won’t have to worry about me maybe patrolling on my own.”

“_Richard—_”

“Geez, B, simmer down, I’m not saying I _would_, gosh, just that you wouldn’t have to _worry_ ‘bout it if I was with Uncle Clark, right?”

Clark and Bruce were both sputtering helplessly now.

“What’samatter, Uncle Clark?” Dick’s voice had gone soft and quiet, so very quiet. “Don’t… don’t you _want_ to hang out with me?”

Clark spent his days worrying about terrorists and shards of kryptonite and the damages reaped by rampant capitalism. What he should have been worrying about was an enemy of Earth learning how to harness the manipulative power of a soft, feather-haired child. There was no might to match it.

“Clark, I’m so sor—” Bruce cut into the silence, but Clark stopped him before he could finish.

“Sure,” he breathed, like it was the only right answer. “Sure, why not?”

Why not, indeed. Clark liked Dick. He was a good kid, a flashing little firefly zipping from one thing to the next. He brought out a lightness in Bruce like no one could, and a joy in Clark that sometimes Clark himself didn’t realize he was lacking.

And really, how hard could it be to handle one kid for a weekend?

Lois, who adored and feared her nieces in equal measure, had laughed outright when he had said the same thing to her later. That was when Clark had truly begun to worry.

The first day had gone well. Bruce had dropped Dick off on Friday afternoon, a Mickey Mouse backpack slung over one shoulder and a smile so wide his face looked ready to split. Bruce handed Clark a list of rules that Clark promised to follow. Then Bruce kissed Dick on the forehead and left. Clark dumped the sheet on the kitchen counter. He assumed it was still there.

They had gone roller skating in the park, played catch on the wide, green lawn, fed pigeons by the fountain, and eaten their body weight in cart dogs. After that had been a double-feature movie at the local theater (with popcorn, soda, and Red Hots) and a quick flight to the top of the Greenwood Tower to watch the stars with cups of gelato in hand.

Dick had nearly been too wired to go to bed, but Clark had finally gotten him to settle with a fully voiced reading of _The Stinky Cheese Man_. At last, the boy had drifted off to sleep, and Clark himself had gone to bed patting himself on the back that he had done well in his first day as babysitter. Just before his eyes closed, his phone buzzed with a text.

_?_

He didn’t recognize the number. He didn’t need to. Bruce wouldn’t use the same burner phone twice.

_thumbs up_ was his reply. All was well. Stop worrying. Stop hovering. Finish your mission so you can see your boy. He’s fine. We’re fine.

The first indication that all was not fine was the weeping moan in the living room. Clark rocketed awake, disoriented and confused but body already tingling with alarm. He tried to block out the world while he slept, a guilty indulgence that had become a necessity after he had nearly run himself into the ground trying to survive on half hour pockets of rest. Only the most devastatingly loud disasters woke him now. Disasters, it seemed, and the cries of a little boy in the next room.

Clark rubbed at one eye and stumbled out of bed. His foot caught on the rug and he hit the floor with a wall-rattling thud before picking himself back up and charging forward.

“Dick?” he mumbled into the dark of the living room.

Maybe he’d misheard. Maybe it was someone down the block. He didn’t want to wake the kid if he was sleeping. Maybe it was just—

A loud, miserable sniffle from the couch laid all doubts to rest.

“Dickie?”

Clark fumbled for the lamp switch, then rounded the couch. The sight and smell hit him at roughly the same moment.

“I threw up,” Dick croaked, bottom lip wobbling. His front was stained with colors Clark didn’t want to study too closely, and the mess had cascaded down the side of the couch.

Clark’s heart raced. What was he supposed to do with a sick child? He had never been a sick child himself, not in the usual ways. More importantly, what was he supposed to do with _Batman_’s sick child? Bruce was going to _kill_ him.

Dick—bright, happy, ever-smiling Dick—looked down at himself and let out another wail. “I’m s-s-sorry about your couuuuuuuuch.”

Clark startled, brought back to himself and the trouble at hand. He had to take care of Dick. Bruce could kill him later.

“Oh, oh, oh,” Clark clucked as he hurried forward. “Shhh, sweetheart, it’s alright, come here.”

Why did children vomit usually? Clark tried to recall if he’d read any articles on the subject, but his brain clicked and whirred like an empty film cartridge.

“Are you feeling feverish?” he asked as he sat on the arm of the couch, careful to avoid the spill of sick. A quick hand pressed to Dick’s forehead confirmed that the kid didn’t feel hot, but then, did Clark know what was hot for a little boy?

“M-My stomach hurt and, and I couldn’t, and then I threw up.” A line of snot had joined the vomit staining the pajama shirt.

“Okay, okay,” Clark shushed. “Let’s get you cleaned up. I’m going to pick you up, okay?”

He lifted Dick off the sofa and floated them both over the mess and into the bathroom. Cleaning up he could manage. Wash the child, dry the child, change the child. Simple, like getting kicked in the head by a cow. It was what came after that worried him. What if Dick was really sick? How would Clark know what to do? He wasn’t prepared for this level of responsibility.

_Breathe. Focus. Get him cleaned up first._

The clean-up was no fun for either of them. Poor Dick couldn’t stop crying, and even Superman wasn’t impervious to the way it felt to pick up a wadded shirt full of half-digested food chunks. He gagged twice on the super-speed trip to the laundry basin. But finally Dick was cleaned up and swaddled in clean clothes and a pinwheel quilt from the linen closet. Clark bundled the little boy up like a lamb brought in from the fields and was about to carry him back into the living room when the bundle squeaked.

“C’n I stay with you?”

Clark stopped, one foot hovering in the air, then reversed course. He’d have to figure out a way to block off one side of the bed. He could just imagine rolling over in his sleep and squashing the child. Maybe he wouldn’t sleep. Maybe he’d just lie awake and think of all the ways Bruce would murder him once the weekend was over.

_I could always run away. Move to space. That’ll buy me some time. Bruce’ll figure out space travel eventually, but maybe he’ll cool off by then._

He shifted Dick to one arm, cradling the boy like a football as he snagged an empty trash can and then straightened the linens on his bed.

“There’s a trash can right here if you need it,” Clark said as he lowered Dick onto the bed. 

“Noooo, you can’t go. C’n you stay? Please?”

It was the wobble in the _please_ that clinched it. Clark lifted Dick back up and carried him about as he gathered the phone, his notebook, and his latest book. Then he settled them both back on the bed, Dick tucked against his side. 

“Anything else hurting?”

Clark could feel Dick’s head shake against his ribs, his shirt already growing damp with tears. Okay, that was something. It kept his heart pumping fast enough to break the sound barrier instead of kicking it up straight to light speed.

Keeping one arm wrapped around Dick, Clark pinned the phone between his shoulder and ear and called the one person he _knew_ would know what to do. The phone rang four times, then clicked, and a familiar voice filtered down the line.

“Clark, honey, what’s wrong?”

“Hi, Ma,” Clark murmured, the sick terror in his chest easing slightly at the sound of her voice. “Sorry to wake you.”

“Don’t be silly, hon. Is something the matter?”

“Yeah, uh.” Clark grimaced as Dick sucked in another loud sniffle. “Dick stayed the night and he just threw up. I don’t know what to check for. He doesn’t feel hot, I don’t think, but I can’t tell.”

Bruce would know. Bruce would be able to take one look at Dick and know exactly what was wrong, like special dad vision for illness. Clark could hear Dick’s heart beating and the blood whooshing through his veins and see each and every one of his delicate bones, and all of it was useless. Maybe it was nothing, but maybe it was something, and what could he do to fight something _inside_?

“Alright, alright, take a breath.” Clark did. Ma’s breaths were never rhetorical. “Does he feel better now that he’s thrown up?”

Clark paused brushing the hair off Dick’s forehead to ask, then reported, “He says yes.”

That was a relief. Clark bent and pressed a kiss to the top of Dick’s head as the boy hiccuped.

“That’s a good sign,” Ma agreed. “It may have just been something he ate during the day. What did you have?”

Clark thought about it and listed off what they’d tried, starting with the churros on the way to the park and ending with the bedtime cocoa. He frowned as his ma began to laugh.

“Well, there's your problem, Clark-boy. You overloaded the poor child.”

Clark’s frown deepened. “What?”

“Us humans have to mind what we eat. That much junk food in one night? Plus the excitement of a new place, being with you? And let me guess, you took him flying.”

Clark could feel the tips of his ears begin to warm. “It was a clear night. We wanted to look at the stars.”

“It’s too much for a little boy. He doesn’t have your constitution, hon. No wonder he’s feeling peaked.”

“So he’s going to be fine?”

“Just fine,” Ma assured. “Let the lamb rest. Give him something light for breakfast and go easy on all that junk. He’ll bounce back.”

Clark’s eyes slid shut in relief. Dick wasn’t dying. Bruce wasn’t going to kill him. Although…

“It’s my fault,” Clark groaned. “Bruce is going to murder me.”

“Nu-uh.” Reassurance came not from Ma, but from Dick. “One time I read that eating bananas and Sprite together will make you puke and Bruce didn’t believe me.”

Clark looked down. Dick nodded sagely.

“What happened?” Clark prompted.

“We had t’test our hypoth’sis.” Dick snuggled closer into Clark’s side and wiped the moisture from one eye. “We both puked.”

Clark let out a bark of laughter that was echoed on the other end of the phone. “Thanks, Ma. I’ll let you get back to sleep, Sorry for waking you.”

“Pish. Happy to help. Give that little boy a kiss for me and tell Bruce I said hi.”

“Will do. Give Pa my love.”

Clark hung up, then bent his neck and smacked a kiss atop Dick’s head. “From Ma. She says you’ll live.”

Dick snorted wetly. “Y’don’t die from barfin’, Uncle Clark.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know that, would I. You scared the feathers off’a me.” Clark set the phone on the bedside table, then squirmed down in the bed. He still planned on staying awake, but he could be comfortable at least.

“You were scared?” Dick asked as he wiggled into a more comfortable position as well. “Over me?”

“Of course. You’re the only nephew I’ve got.” Clark tucked the blankets around Dick and then confided, “Also, your dad is really scary.”

“Uncle Claaaark.” Dick huffed contentedly as he nestled into Clark’s side. Clark could feel his heart beating, like the rush of sparrow wings. He could feel his own heart settling, slowing, rocking into an easier rhythm.

“Quiet, bean sprout. It’s past your bedtime.”

“Can we have pancakes for breakfast tomorrow?”

“We’ll see.”

“With syrup and whipped cream?”

“I’m tabling this conversation until you’ve gone more than an hour without throwing up.”

“Hey, Uncle Clark?”

“Yes, Dick.”

“I’m glad you let me come over.”

“Me too.”

**Author's Note:**

> And thus concludes Whumptober!


End file.
